Almond Cheese

Since I’ve been going on about how home made Almond milk is so much nicer than store bought, I’ve also been asked what to do with the Almond pulp and the answer is of course…

MAKE CHEESE!

It’s a great dairy free alternative and you can add pretty much anything to it. If you want a richer cheese and don’t want to make milk then use the whole almonds, but as far as I am concerned the cheese is a by product of something else. If you’re going to dehydrate it afterwards or ferment it – what difference does it make?

‘Almond Cheese stage 1′ is so easy and actually pretty tasty, you can also add what you want to it to make it more tasty but here is recipe #1 plain old Almond cheese with cracked black pepper and parsley garnish.

I am still quite new at this so have been keeping it simple but will progress to more complicated cheeses as time goes on.

How to make Almond Nut Cheese

Take the Almond Pulp from stage 6 of the Almond Milk recipe - or just soak overnight, de-skin and blend your almonds until you get a thick paste

Place the paste in butter muslin, cheese muslin or a nut bag

Squeeze the liquid out then put a weight on the top if you are just grinding up soaked almonds there will be less liquid

I hadn’t thought this far ahead so I had to improvise with my juicer strainer, the bottom of my grinder and my massive pestle and mortar on the top (it’s the heaviest gadget in the kitchen) –>

Once you open the muslin, the almond dry paste is is your basic cheese with no fermentation at all – I find it tastes a little like cooked egg whites so you can add a lot of flavour. Many recipes suggest garlic, salt, pepper, nutritional yeast, herbs, vegetable powders etc. I chose just salt and pepper as garlic not cooked and fermented is not something I think will be very nice!

If you want to ferment quickly get some pro biotic powder and add a few spoonfuls, you can also use ‘rejuvelac‘ (soaked wheat water that has started to ferment), but that is a little advanced and complicated for me at this stage as that’s another 48-72 hours to make. You can also just leave the cheese in a warm place for 24-48 hours but without the pro biotic element you may as well just put it in the fridge as is and add things to it.

Basic Almond Cheese Recipe – Stage 1

Almond Paste put through a muslin – and that’s it – you can stop here and just add some almond milk back in until you reach a creamy cheese consistency

I went on to add this though

A spoonful of pro biotic powder (to see what it did)

Cracked Black Pepper to taste

Pinch of Salt

Chopped Parsley to roll the cheese in with some more fresh ground black pepper

I also made a version with no parsley put in the dehydrator for 4 hours to get a ‘rind’ then left overnight to see how much tastier it got with a little fermentation – the next attempt will leave it to ferment for the full 24-48 hours to get the full cheesy flavour

The result?

A tasty grainy cream cheese with a slight tang to it. The second batch left overnight was definitely more tangy. Delicious on home made oat cakes.

I think the next batch left to ferment for a few days will increase the tang even more – here’s to finding out